RISKY BUSINESS

IT’S HALF-PAST TIME TO KILL YOUR ORGANISATION'S OUTDATED RISK MANAGEMENT AND ASSESSMENT TOOLS. 6CLICKS IS HERE TO HELP.

Anne-Frances Hutchinson

Risk. Every year, Australian companies across the spectrum of industry are faced with meeting compliance standards and effectively assessing, managing, and mitigating risk. These risks and standards are continually changing to confront new, ingenious, and pernicious attacks on the critical data that businesses collect, store, and profit from. What’s not changing for many companies is the pace at which those practices and technologies are advancing.

For 6clicks CEO Anthony Stevens, it’s well past time to move into the modern era. “It’s time to kill the spreadsheet,” he recently told VENTURE.

Many enterprises, startups, and government agencies use spreadsheets and email as a way to link information available in the public domain to their internal or external compliance requirements and keep those critical routines up to snuff. The amount of manual work required to manage the complexity of information isn’t just enormous, it doesn’t do enough to help shield organisations from the risks they are working so diligently— and with a fair measure of futility—to prevent.

TACKLING RISK HEAD-ON

Established last year in Melbourne, 6clicks is helping the modern enterprise redefine their approaches to risk and compliance by connecting organisations, third parties, service providers, and regulators from around the world. And there’s quite a bit of redefinition to be done.

“If we go back to the way people have tackled compliance for decades and is commonplace in a lot of businesses, companies will decide, ‘What will we have to do? What is a regulator asking us to do? What standards are in place for us to do business effectively in the industry we’re trying to serve?’ They have to look at the things that are important to them internally and then check whether those things are actually done. At a very practical level, most companies end up using spreadsheets; they try to build a sort of mapping logic to link everything in the public domain to all the things they need to do internally and how they are progressing against those things,” Stevens explained.

“The thing that we do that people love and want to work with us for, is help map that logic between the public domain and internal controls and everything they need to assess within our system. We do that in a really easy way and that’s half the trick. We present 6clicks as a solution to kill the spreadsheet hell. The minute you shift that into a living and breathing system you are then in a better place to think about compliance proactively and put in place processes to manage improvement over time,” he continued.

“We bake in all the standards, laws, and regulations. Our system has a huge library of all the regulations in Australia in the cyber security space and globally. We do that for the same reason, to help organisations get away from going to websites and downloading PDFs and spreadsheets and trying to map those against what they are or should be doing internally. We take away that pain.